Search results for " electronic engineering"

An android architecture for bio-inspired honest signalling in Human-Humanoid Interaction

2017

Abstract This paper outlines an augmented robotic architecture to study the conditions of successful Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI). The architecture is designed as a testable model generator for interaction centred on the ability to emit, display and detect honest signals. First we overview the biological theory in which the concept of honest signals has been put forward in order to assess its explanatory power. We reconstruct the application of the concept of honest signalling in accounting for interaction in strategic contexts and in laying bare the foundation for an automated social metrics. We describe the modules of the architecture, which is intended to implement the concept of hon…

Assessing data analysis performance in research contexts: An experiment on accuracy, efficiency, productivity and researchers’ satisfaction

2018

[EN] Any knowledge generation process involves raw data comprehension, evaluation and inferential reasoning. These practices, common to different disciplines, are known as data analysis, and represent the most important set of activities in research contexts. Researchers use data analysis software methods and tools for generating new knowledge in their daily data analysis. In recent years, data analysis software has been incorporating explicit references in modelling of cognitive processes, in order to improve the assistance offered in data analysis tasks. However, data analysis software commercial suites are still resisting this inclusion, and there is little empirical work done in knowing…

Hybrid Position/Force Control for Hydraulic Actuators

2020

In this paper a novel hybrid position/force control with autonomous switching between both control modes is introduced for hydraulic actuators. A hybrid position/force control structure with feed-forwarding, full-state feedback, including integral control error, pre-compensator of the deadzone, and low-pass filtering of the control value is designed. Controller gains are obtained via local linearization and pole placement accomplished separately for the position and force control. A hysteresis-based autonomous switching is integrated into the closed control loop, while multiple Lyapunov function based approach is applied for stability analysis of the entire hybrid control system. Experiment…

Super-resolved linear fluorescence localization microscopy using photostable fluorophores: A virtual microscopy study

2017

Abstract Current approaches to overcome the conventional limit of the resolution potential of light microscopy (of about 200 nm for visible light), often suffer from non-linear effects, which render the quantification of the image intensities in the reconstructions difficult, and also affect the quantification of the biological structure under investigation. As an attempt to face these difficulties, we discuss a particular method of localization microscopy which is based on photostable fluorescent dyes. The proposed method can potentially be implemented as a fast alternative for quantitative localization microscopy, circumventing the need for the acquisition of thousands of image frames and…

Simple Muscle Architecture Analysis (SMA): An ImageJ macro tool to automate measurements in B-mode ultrasound scans

2020

In vivo measurements of muscle architecture (i.e. the spatial arrangement of muscle fascicles) are routinely included in research and clinical settings to monitor muscle structure, function and plasticity. However, in most cases such measurements are performed manually, and more reliable and time-efficient automated methods are either lacking completely, or are inaccessible to those without expertise in image analysis. In this work, we propose an ImageJ script to automate the entire analysis process of muscle architecture in ultrasound images: Simple Muscle Architecture Analysis (SMA). Images are filtered in the spatial and frequency domains with built-in commands and external plugins to hi…

Renewable energies, business models and local growth

2018

Abstract Energy is one of the driving factors of the world economy: energy consumption is closely linked to quality of life and environmental impact. Reducing the use of fossil fuels, curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, and cutting energy dependence from traditional energy producing countries are the cornerstones of European policies for safe, competitive, sustainable, and renewable energy. In addition, the pressing need to provide new and diversified opportunities for supplementary income for the agricultural sector has fueled the desire to engage rural areas in this process. Biogas, derived from the anaerobic digestion of biomass, is one of the renewable energy sources that has been very…

Melanoma-Nevus Discrimination Based on Image Statistics in Few Spectral Channels

2016

The purpose of this paper is to offer a method for discrimination of cutaneous melanoma from benign nevus, founded on analysis of skin lesion image. At the core of method is calculation of mean and standard deviation of pixel optical density values for a few narrow spectral bands. Calculated values are compared with discriminating thresholds derived from a set of images of benign nevi and melanomas with known diagnosis. Classification is done applying weighted majority rule to results of thresholding. Verification against the available multispectral images of 32 melanomas and 94 benign nevi has shown that the method using three spectral bands provided zero false negative and four false posi…

2016

The growth of next-generation sequencing (NGS) datasets poses a challenge to the alignment of reads to reference genomes in terms of alignment quality and execution speed. Some available aligners have been shown to obtain high quality mappings at the expense of long execution times. Finding fast yet accurate software solutions is of high importance to research, since availability and size of NGS datasets continue to increase. In this work we present an efficient parallelization approach for NGS short-read alignment on multi-core clusters. Our approach takes advantage of a distributed shared memory programming model based on the new UPC++ language. Experimental results using the CUSHAW3 alig…

View images with unprecedented resolution in integral microscopy

2018

Integral microscopy is a novel technique that allows the simultaneous capture of multiple perspective images of microscopic samples. This feature is achieved at the cost of a significant reduction of the spatial resolution. In fact, it is assumed that in the best cases the resolution is reduced by a factor that is not smaller than ten, what poses a hard drawback to the utility of the technique. However, to the best of our knowledge, this resolution limitation has never been researched rigorously. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to explore the real limitations in resolution of integral microscopy and to obtain optically, without the need of any image-processing algorithm, perspecti…

Fast Inertia-Free Volumetric Light-Sheet Microscope

2017

Fast noninvasive three-dimensional (3D) imag-ing is crucial for quantitatively studying highly dynamic events ranging from flow cytometry to developmental biology. Light-sheet microscopy has emerged as the tool-of-choice for 3D characterization of rapidly evolving systems. However, to obtain a 3D image, either the sample or parts of the microscope are moved, limiting the acquisition speed. Here, we propose a novel inertia-free light-sheet-based scheme for volumetric imaging at high temporal resolution. Our approach comprises a novel combination of an acousto-optic scanner to produce tailored illumination and an acoustic-optofluidic lens, placed in the detection path to provide extended dept…